


Whatever It Takes

by thewightknight



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Gen, Horror, but magic has its price, lovecraft, non sexy tentacles, scotty is a miracle worker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-24
Updated: 2017-06-24
Packaged: 2018-11-18 13:04:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11291265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewightknight/pseuds/thewightknight
Summary: Mr. Scott always managed to save them, to work some miracle to give Kirk the time he needed. How he did it, Kirk never asked, until it was too late.





	Whatever It Takes

**Author's Note:**

> I keep waffling back and forth whether this takes place in new Trek or TOS.

_Humanity always had tales. Tales of the monsters that lived in the deep. Sailors scoffed among themselves even as they poured libations over the rails and tattooed talismans of protection on their skin. You’d think, once they moved beyond the seas into the vastness of space, such tales would fade into antiquity. But no. Once humanity reached the stars, they found new monsters._

 

 

Kirk breathed a sigh of relief as the alien spaceship burst into a thousand fragments. They’d survived. Scotty had worked his magic yet again. He toggled the comm switch on his chair.

“Scotty! You did it! ….. Scotty?”

“Um, Captain, Mr. Scott can’t … he can’t talk right now.”

The connection wavered, static almost overriding the words.

“What is it?”

“Oh my god, he … I can’t … it’s horrible.

“I’m on my way.”

“No, Captain! Don’t come down here! Don’t let anyone come down ….”

The words cut off as the turbolift doors closed.

Emergency lighting flickered as Kirk raced through the corridors, bulkheads twisted from the pounding they’d taken. Something must be affecting the environmental systems, as wisps of fog floated a few inches above the floor and he caught a whiff of a faint miasmal odor. And the atmosphere must be off too. Kirk staggered, dizzy, and had to slow to a walk. Reaching out to steady himself, he snatched his hand back as the wall seemed to pulse beneath his touch.

“Must be hallucinating. Computer, run diagnostics on environmental.”

“All systems are functioning within normal parameters, Captain.” The ship’s voice echoed in the corridor. Had the damage to the ship stretched it somehow? He didn’t remember it ever being so long.

The door to engineering hissed open, its sibilance sinister in the foetid air. A tentacle oozed through the doorway, making a detestable squishy noise as it slithered across the floor and up the wall.

“What the …?”

Scotty hung suspended in front of a giant eye that had somehow taken the place of the warp core, his uniform peeking out in flashes from under the mass of appendages that swirled around him.

“You said to do whatever it takes, Captain. Don’t worry. The effects should only be temporary. At least for everyone else.” Scotty laughed, bloody tears streaming down his contorted cheeks.

“Scotty, no.”

“There’s a cost, you know? There’s always a cost.” His eyes had taken on a demonic tint, glowing in the dim light, pulsing in rhythm with the contraction of the tentacles around him. “But we won, right? Please tell me we won?”

“We won, Scotty.”

“That’s good then. You should go now.”

“Scotty….”

“GO!”

Kirk staggered backwards and the tentacles chased him. When he reached the corridor they stopped, curling around the doors and dragging them closed, with a knell that reverberated throughout the corridor and drove Kirk to his knees with a maddened shriek.

How long he crouched there, he couldn’t say. Long enough for the heartbeat of the floor beneath him to fade, for the fog to dissipate. Long enough that he could gather the shredded remnants of his courage and stand and approach the doors again.

They whooshed open, and the warp core glowed its calm blue light as the engineering crew rushed about in response to the various alerts that still sounded. He flagged down the closest ensign.

“Where’s Scotty?”

“Who?”

“Scotty! Mr. Scott. The chief engineer?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know who that is. Lt. Watkins has been our chief engineer since we began the mission?”

“No.”  
  
“Sir, are you alright? I can escort you to medical.”

Squaring his shoulders, he forced a smile at her. “No, that’s alright. Carry on.”

 

_Captain’s Log, Stardate 2335.5: Lieutenant Commander Scott has been wiped from the memories of all Enterprise crew, and no records of him exist in our logs. It seems the price for saving our lives was the complete and total eradication of his own existence. I hope that we can be worthy of his sacrifice. I also hope that his price has been paid in full, and that he has not been pulled into whatever realm of existence the being he summoned resides. That would be too high a price to pay._

Saving his log, Kirk lay back in his bunk.

“Lights 10%.”

He couldn’t bear to sleep in the dark anymore. When all the lights were off, it seemed like a voice reached out to him from the void. Screaming.

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to[ come say hi on tumblr!](http://thewightknight.tumblr.com/)


End file.
